'Truth spoken without moderation reverses itself'
This blog is a source for intellectual exploration. It includes a list of alternative resources and a source of free books. The placement of an article does not imply that I agree with it, merely that I found it thought-provoking. There are also poems and book reviews. Texts written by me are labelled. Readers are free to re-post anything they like.

Tuesday, December 27, 2016

America - No President - the view from n+1 // Tom Engelhardt - The Future According to Trump

. During the
presidential campaign, Trump went on record, repeatedly, steadily, and
memorably in front of us all - in the debates, in the press, in his campaign
communications - to register that he would not obey the norms of the republic.
He would not submit to the rule of law, and he would not act in the interests
of the republic as a citizen. He would not submit to the result of the
election, or a smooth succession, if he lost the vote. He did not acknowledge
the independence of the judiciary. He had not paid his share of taxes to the
state... Trump served a salutary function as long
as he was not elected, in showing the compromises and corruptions of American
society in his own person. He could say, and show, that the “system was rigged”
and corrupt because he had done his best to make it so… “I alone can fix our
nation because I have contributed at the highest level to its destruction and
corruption” is not an admission that can command loyalty or legitimacy. It is a
whistle-blowing admission that forfeits standing. Trump can only be understood,
paradoxically, as an enemy of the republic…

The task for “good people” is noncooperation. This is how to communicate what the republic can and cannot allow... The ordinary, unromantic, and vilified forms of disobedience may turn out to be most needed. Refusal of allegiance. Refusal of participation. Not showing up. Leaving key government jobs, or staying in those jobs to slow down or stall illegitimate actions. Daily refusal to go along with orders coming from an illegitimate executive..

… Racism, nationalism,
and patriarchy belong to a common project. All nationalist programs reduce
women to breeders for the nation, expelling, degrading, or killing those they
don’t want. Nationalism is not kind to gays, lesbians, or gender
nonconformists, either. At best, women can hope to be exceptions — honorary men
granted the privilege of oppressing other women. The respect, pride, and
affection benevolent patriarchs have for women is similar to the sort they have
for their dogs. The difference is not in degree but kind: the love of masters
for their pets can be deep, but it’s not the love of equals.

If political progress
resembles the movement of a train, the front car chugging toward a
still-distant horizon of possibility, reaction attacks the station, the point
of entry where people linger, hesitate, and imagine getting on board. We
thought we could take the entry point of feminism for granted, believe in the
permanence of its basic achievements: the franchise and representation in
government, the right to pleasure and the right to solitude, 100 cents on the
dollar for our labor, the freedom to decide when and whether to have children.
We assumed our own generation’s fight would be for new and better things, for
ways of being and thinking not available in the past — not for the achievements
won by our mothers and grandmothers. But while we had our eyes on the horizon,
the rear car was derailed, the station besieged. The challenge, now, is to
expect nothing but still demand everything: to fight our mothers’ fight and our
own at the same time….

... There is every reason to expect the worst. We
should prepare for an increase in deportations, further militarization of our
borders and police forces, cuts in social programs (with particular damage to minority
communities), and an increase in hate crimes. Democracy itself may well be at
stake...

WE DO FEEL READY to blame someone. Clinton’s campaign was
doomed from the start. “Not our President”? Not our Party either. The
Democrats — festooned this season with celebrities and capitalists to an
unthinking degree — rarely talked about what workers and the dispossessed
needed to build their lives. Most voters could hardly name a thing Clinton was for.
Instead, the campaign piped into every swing-state living room a nonstop stream
of American success, the sunshine pabulum of the DNC: “America is great because
America is good,” “America is already great.” Anger, loss, and economic trauma
could be overcome by a genial disposition, an endless exhibition of proper
behavior with an extra helping of negative ads correcting Trump for his crude
(never “criminal”) actions.

If voters didn’t know
what Clinton was for, they knew what she was against: Donald Trump, and people
who did things like him. Her strategy was “disqualification.” Clinton ran on
“competence”: She was, as her supporters never ceased to remind us, “the most
qualified presidential candidate in history.” The message was engineered to
resonate with white-collar women familiar with being passed over for
senior-level jobs. But it put a new twist on the politics of ’60s
neo-conservatism, combining it with the meritocratic strain that’s ruled the
Democratic Party since the ’80s. No need for a straightforward, easily
intelligible ideological call - the people versus “the billionaire class,” say.
Just: Trust us. Our policies are healthy and good for you.

This story about the ultimate
triumph of the most talented may well have sounded familiar to voters
struggling to stay above water. It may even have prompted many of them not to
vote. When they lost their jobs, or struggled to stay afloat as incomes
stagnated and costs rose, they were repeatedly told that their misfortune was
their fault. They didn’t have the right skills, they had failed to keep up. Why
did they stay in “sunset” industries? Why couldn’t they just go to college and
get a “good job” like the meritocrats? The working class didn’t lose out
because politicians considered them expendable. They lost, they were told,
because they were not competent.

It was this rhetoric
that moved Trump beyond criticism. If the trouble with Trump was that experts
called him incompetent, or that he should have been disqualified for saying
things that, while terrible, could be spun as “honest,” then the trouble with
Trump was the trouble with the struggling voters themselves. They, too, had
been told that they were incompetent, that they were unqualified. To turn
against Trump would be to turn against oneself. To embrace Trump was to embrace
a particular version of oneself, to give free rein to impulses that on other
occasions - four and eight years ago, for instance - had been restrained. One
does not need to sympathize with this logic to understand its force….

Enemy of the Republic - IT IS FAR BETTER to “overreact” to a moment that sets
up the means for tyranny than not to react. Better to seize hold of the
abnormal than turn violation into the normal. If the polity is not
the state but its citizens, the most important thing individual Americans can
do is deny Trump aid, collaboration, agreement, and acceptance. Not accept, not
adjust, not adapt, not appease, not conciliate. There is something sinister in
the media’s “ten-step plans” to adjust to a President-Elect Trump, as if this
were a personal upset needing therapy rather than a question of democratic
legitimacy itself.

For the time being,
many Americans may have to be political to an unusual degree, and political in
a new way. One should consider citizens’ capacity to resist and disobey. To
what extremes of disobedience and resistant behavior do peaceful Americans know
how to go? The ordinary, unromantic, and vilified forms of disobedience may
turn out to be most needed. Refusal of allegiance. Refusal of participation.
Not showing up. Leaving key government jobs, or staying in those jobs to slow
down or stall illegitimate actions. Daily refusal to go along with orders
coming from an illegitimate executive. Refusal of bureaucrats, tasked with
reporting on citizens, to report if it could put their subjects in jeopardy. Refusal
of enforcement agencies to enforce. Refusals and resignations in the armed
forces. Refusal of those tasked with cooperating with the government to
cooperate.

The old rule of thumb
for a republic is that all points of view and methods of politics can be
endured except the one that denies rule of law in the republic. This alone can
and should be treated as a threat, as if coming from outside. During the
presidential campaign, Trump went on record, repeatedly, steadily, and
memorably in front of us all - in the debates, in the press, in his campaign
communications - to register that he would not obey the norms of the republic.
He would not submit to the rule of law, and he would not act in the interests
of the republic as a citizen. He would not submit to the result of the
election, or a smooth succession, if he lost the vote. He did not acknowledge
the independence of the judiciary. He had not paid his share of taxes to the
state. He would not separate his policies from personal enrichment. In this
sense, he was like many of his class. Trump served a salutary function as long
as he was not elected, in showing the compromises and corruptions of American
society in his own person. He could say, and show, that the “system was rigged”
and corrupt because he had done his best to make it so...

The thing before our
eyes, in other words, is the installation of an extralegal and extrajudicial
personality into the presidency — an office that has been expanded, through
Republican and Democratic administrations, decade after decade, to dangerous
excesses of power. This includes the proliferation of executive orders that
have the force of law. Executive orders make the President not merely someone
presiding over a tripartite government but a premodern monarch or führer.

But
it is the more ordinary coercive powers of the executive that add urgency to
the situation: The Department of Justice. The Attorney General. Federal
prosecutors and the FBI. The Department of Homeland Security. Citizenship and
Immigration Services, and the TSA. The Department of the Treasury and the IRS.
The Department of Defense and the military. Having witnessed the Republican
Party fail to eject Trump as a candidate and nearly half of the voting
citizenry elect him through the Electoral College, does the system itself have
any capacity to restrain such an extralegal personality from reaching the
inauguration?

THE BEST WAY to prevent a tyrant’s rule is not to
seat him at all - even at the risk of unfairness to an individual who might
have become better than his word. We’ve seen the slogan and heard the chant
“Not my President,” but the slogan should instead be “No President.” Trump is
no President in his attitudes and beliefs, but we should decide we do not have
a President, through the paradox of the legitimate election of an illegitimate
officeholder. The most valuable lesson the United States could learn in 2016 is
that it can get along without a President. It would throw weight back onto
Congress - the place where political power should lie in a democracy. This is
close to how the country ran during the years of Radical (or “Congressional”)
Reconstruction, when Congress all but seized power for the last two years of
President Andrew Johnson’s reign.

The instinct of
“respectable” politicians and the mass media is to regularize and contain, to
cooperate and appease - wrongly, and dangerously. This moment places a pressure
on individual conscience and judgment, as each isolated person is reminded to
join others in a collective will to refusal. It also leaves many of us
twiddling our thumbs much of the time, hoping that those individuals who must
take orders will refuse or resign. The task for “good people” is
noncooperation. This is how to communicate what the republic can and cannot
allow.

Along with this must
come greater cooperation among ourselves, a commitment to building democratic
institutions inside and outside the existing parties. It should not have come
as a surprise how little civil society exists among the left, how little
prepared we were to pursue projects of social justice against a revanchist
administration. We enter this reactionary era more atomized and isolated than
we should be.

But there are signs of
response. The wave of “joining” that has already taken place in the wake of
Trump’s victory — the proliferation of meetings and organizational sign-ups,
the sudden jump in members of the Democratic Socialists of America, the frenzied
petitions and Facebook posts urging us to call our representatives and make
demands — is the first step toward creating a denser, less pliant movement.
Organizations should grow large enough to command assemblies on the level of a
neighborhood in addition to that of a city. (There is a virtue, as Wordsworth
held long ago, in “the talk / Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk /
Of the mind’s business.”) The move to transform the Democratic Party and to
build organizations outside it in the hope, forever deferred, of a true party
of the left, ought to turn political parties from more than volunteer
door-knockers who come around every four years to ask for votes in swing
states. This would have been the project no matter who the President. It has
only acquired new salience and urgency... read the full article:

Since at least Dwight Eisenhower, American presidents have been in the camp of the assassins. With Eisenhower, it was the CIA’s plot against Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba; with John Kennedy (and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy), it was Cuba’s Fidel Castro; with Richard Nixon (and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger), it was the killing of Chilean President Salvador Allendein a U.S.-backed military coup, which was also the first 9/11 attack (September 11, 1973). ..In 1976, in the wake of Watergate, President Gerald Ford would outlaw political assassination by executive order, a ban reaffirmed by subsequent presidents (although Ronald Reagan did direct U.S. Air Force planes to bomb Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi’s home). As this new century began, however, the sexiest high-tech killer around, the appropriately named Predator drone, would be armed with Hellfire missiles and sent into action in the war on terror, creating the possibility of presidential assassinations on a scale never before imagined...

Can you doubt that
we’re in a dystopian age, even if we’re still four weeks from Donald Trump
entering the Oval Office? Never in our lifetimes have we experienced such vivid
previews of what unfettered capitalism is likely to mean in an ever more unequal country, now that its version of 1% politics has elevated to the pinnacle of power a
bizarre billionaire and his “basket of deplorables.” I’m referring, of course,
not to his followers but to his picks for the highest posts in the land. These
include a series of generals ready to lead us into a new set of crusades and
a crew of billionaires and multimillionaires prepared to make
America theirs again.

It’s already a
stunningly depressing moment -- and it hasn’t even begun. At the very least, it
calls upon the rest of us to rise to the occasion. That means mustering a
dystopian imagination that matches the era to come. I have no doubt that
you’re as capable as I am of creating bleak scenarios for the future of this
country (not to speak of the planet). But just to get the ball rolling on the
eve of the holidays, let me offer you a couple of my own dystopian fantasies,
focused on the potential actions of President Donald Trump.

There
is already an enormous literature -- practically a library -- of writings on
our unique president-elect’s potential conflicts of interests. He does, after
all, own, or lease his name to, various towers, elite golf courses, clubs,
hotels, condos, residences, and who knows what else in at least 18 to 20 countries. That name of his, invariably in impressive
gold lettering, soars to striking heights in foreign skies across the planet.
These days, in fact, the Trump brand and its conflicts are hard to escape, from
Bali, the Philippines, and Dubai to Scotland, India, and the very heart of
Manhattan Island. There, in my own hometown, at a cost to local taxpayers like
me of more than a million bucks a day, the police are protecting him big
time, while the Secret Service and the military add their heft to the growing armed camp in
mid-Manhattan. They are, of course, defending the Trump Tower
-- the very one in which, in June 2015, to Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” he rode that
escalator directly into the presidential campaign, promising to build a "great wall," lock out
all Mexican "rapists," and "make America great again."

That tower on busy
Fifth Avenue is now fronted by dump trucks filled with sand (“to help protect the
Republican presidential nominee from potentially explosive attacks”) and, with
the safety of the president and his family in mind, the Secret Service is
reportedly considering renting out a couple of floors of the building at a cost
to the American taxpayer of $3 million annually, which would, of course, go
directly into the coffers of a Trump company. (Hey, no conflict of
interest there and don’t even mention the word “kleptocracy”!) All of
this will undoubtedly ensure that New York’s most Trump-worthy building, aka
the White House North, will be kept reasonably safe from intruders, attackers,
suicide bombers, and the like. But much of the imperial Trump brand
around the world may not be quite so lucky. Elsewhere, guards will generally
be private hires, not government employees, and the money available for any
security plans will, as a result, be far more modest.

With rareexceptions, the attention of the media has focused on only one aspect
of Donald Trump’s conflict-of-interest issues (and they are rampant), not to
speak of his urge to duck what he might do about them, or dodge and weave
to avoid a promised news conference to discuss them and
the role ofhis children in his presidency and his
businesses. The emphasis has generally been on the kinds of problems that
would arise from a businessman with a branded name coming to power and
profiting from, or making decisions based on the money to be made off of, his
presidency. Media reports have generally zeroed in, for instance, on how
foreign leaders and others might affect national policy by essentially
promising to enrich Trump or his children. They report on diplomats who
feel obliged to stay at his new hotel on Pennsylvania
Avenue just down the street from the White House; or foreign heads of state reaching out to him via his business partners in their
lands; or Trump brand deals that are now going through in various countries thanks to his
election victory.

The focus is almost
invariably on how to cope with a president who, for at least the next four
years, could stand to profit in mind-boggling ways from his various acts in
office (or simply from the position he holds, even if he does nothing). And
make no mistake, that issue might indeed edge Trump’s presidency into the truly
dodgy, not to say paradigm breaking, when it comes to the history of the White
House. But don’t call that dystopian.

What few people (the
Secret Service aside) are thinking about is the ways in which conflicts of
interest could consume the new president by threatening not to enrich, but
impoverish him (and his children). Head down that path and believe me you’re
instantly in dystopian territory.